Book of Common Prayer
A Prayer in Sickness[a]
41 Happy are those who are concerned for the poor;
the Lord will help them when they are in trouble.
2 The Lord will protect them and preserve their lives;
he will make them happy in the land;
he will not abandon them to the power of their enemies.
3 The Lord will help them when they are sick
and will restore them to health.
4 I said, “I have sinned against you, Lord;
be merciful to me and heal me.”
5 My enemies say cruel things about me.
They want me to die and be forgotten.
6 Those who come to see me are not sincere;
they gather bad news about me
and then go out and tell it everywhere.
7 All who hate me whisper to each other about me,
they imagine the worst about[b] me.
8 They say, “He is fatally ill;
he will never leave his bed again.”
9 (A)Even my best friend, the one I trusted most,
the one who shared my food,
has turned against me.
10 Be merciful to me, Lord, and restore my health,
and I will pay my enemies back.
11 They will not triumph over me,
and I will know that you are pleased with me.
12 You will help me, because I do what is right;
you will keep me in your presence forever.
13 (B)Praise the Lord, the God of Israel!
Praise him now and forever!
Amen! Amen!
(A)God's Judgment and Grace[a]
52 Why do you boast, great one, of your evil?
God's faithfulness is eternal.
2 You make plans to ruin others;
your tongue is like a sharp razor.
You are always inventing lies.
3 You love evil more than good
and falsehood more than truth.
4 You love to hurt people with your words, you liar!
5 So God will ruin you forever;
he will take hold of you and snatch you from your home;
he will remove you from the world of the living.
6 Righteous people will see this and be afraid;
then they will laugh at you and say,
7 “Look, here is someone who did not depend on God for safety,
but trusted instead in great wealth
and looked for security in being wicked.”
8 But I am like an olive tree growing in the house of God;
I trust in his constant love forever and ever.
9 I will always thank you, God, for what you have done;
in the presence of your people
I will proclaim that you are good.
A Prayer for Protection[a]
44 With our own ears we have heard it, O God—
our ancestors have told us about it,
about the great things you did in their time,
in the days of long ago:
2 how you yourself drove out the heathen
and established your people in their land;
how you punished the other nations
and caused your own to prosper.
3 Your people did not conquer the land with their swords;
they did not win it by their own power;
it was by your power and your strength,
by the assurance of your presence,
which showed that you loved them.
4 You are my king and my God;
you give[b] victory to your people,
5 and by your power we defeat our enemies.
6 I do not trust in my bow
or in my sword to save me;
7 but you have saved us from our enemies
and defeated those who hate us.
8 We will always praise you
and give thanks to you forever.
9 But now you have rejected us and let us be defeated;
you no longer march out with our armies.
10 You made us run from our enemies,
and they took for themselves what was ours.
11 You allowed us to be slaughtered like sheep;
you scattered us in foreign countries.
12 You sold your own people for a small price
as though they had little value.[c]
13 Our neighbors see what you did to us,
and they mock us and laugh at us.
14 You have made us a joke among the nations;
they shake their heads at us in scorn.
15 I am always in disgrace;
I am covered with shame
16 from hearing the sneers and insults
of my enemies and those who hate me.
17 All this has happened to us,
even though we have not forgotten you
or broken the covenant you made with us.
18 We have not been disloyal to you;
we have not disobeyed your commands.
19 Yet you left us helpless among wild animals;
you abandoned us in deepest darkness.
20 If we had stopped worshiping our God
and prayed to a foreign god,
21 you would surely have discovered it,
because you know our secret thoughts.
22 (A)But it is on your account that we are being killed all the time,
that we are treated like sheep to be slaughtered.
23 Wake up, Lord! Why are you asleep?
Rouse yourself Don't reject us forever!
24 Why are you hiding from us?
Don't forget our suffering and trouble!
25 We fall crushed to the ground;
we lie defeated in the dust.
26 Come to our aid!
Because of your constant love save us!
4 It is silly to trust people too quickly. If you sin, you are hurting yourself. 5 If wickedness makes you happy, you will be condemned.
Loose Talk
6 Avoid idle talk, and you will avoid a lot of trouble. 7 Never repeat what you hear, and you will have no regrets. 8 Don't tell it to your friends or your enemies unless it would be sinful to keep it to yourself. 9 Whoever hears you will take note of it, and sooner or later will hate you for it. 10 Have you heard a rumor? Let it die with you. Be brave! It won't make you explode. 11 A foolish person trying to keep a secret suffers like a woman in labor. 12 Any time he hears a secret, it's like an arrow stuck in his leg.
13 If you hear that a friend has done something wrong, ask him about it. Maybe it isn't true. If it is true, he won't do it again. 14 If you hear that a neighbor has said something he shouldn't, ask him about it. Maybe he didn't say it. If he did, he won't say it again. 15 If you hear something bad about a friend, ask him about it. It might be a lie. Don't believe everything you hear. 16 A person may say something carelessly and not really mean it. Everyone has sinned in this way at one time or another. 17 If you hear something that makes you angry with your neighbor, ask him about it before you threaten him. Leave the matter to the Law of the Most High.[a]
The Two Witnesses
11 (A)I was then given a stick that looked like a measuring-rod, and was told, “Go and measure the temple of God and the altar, and count those who are worshiping in the temple. 2 (B)But do not measure the outer courts, because they have been given to the heathen, who will trample on the Holy City for forty-two months. 3 I will send my two witnesses dressed in sackcloth, and they will proclaim God's message during those 1, 260 days.”
4 (C)The two witnesses are the two olive trees and the two lamps that stand before the Lord of the earth. 5 If anyone tries to harm them, fire comes out of their mouths and destroys their enemies; and in this way whoever tries to harm them will be killed. 6 (D)They have authority to shut up the sky so that there will be no rain during the time they proclaim God's message. They have authority also over the springs of water, to turn them into blood; they have authority also to strike the earth with every kind of plague as often as they wish.
7 (E)When they finish proclaiming their message, the beast that comes up out of the abyss will fight against them. He will defeat them and kill them, 8 (F)and their bodies will lie in the street of the great city, where their Lord was crucified. The symbolic name of that city is Sodom, or Egypt. 9 People from all nations, tribes, languages, and races will look at their bodies for three and a half days and will not allow them to be buried. 10 The people of the earth will be happy because of the death of these two. They will celebrate and send presents to each other, because those two prophets brought much suffering upon the whole human race. 11 (G)After three and a half days a life-giving breath came from God and entered them, and they stood up; and all who saw them were terrified. 12 (H)Then the two prophets heard a loud voice say to them from heaven, “Come up here!” As their enemies watched, they went up into heaven in a cloud. 13 (I)At that very moment there was a violent earthquake; a tenth of the city was destroyed, and seven thousand people were killed. The rest of the people were terrified and praised the greatness of the God of heaven.
14 The second horror is over, but the third horror will come soon!
Jesus and Beelzebul(A)
14 Jesus was driving out a demon that could not talk; and when the demon went out, the man began to talk. The crowds were amazed, 15 (B)but some of the people said, “It is Beelzebul, the chief of the demons, who gives him the power to drive them out.”
16 (C)Others wanted to trap Jesus, so they asked him to perform a miracle to show that God approved of him. 17 But Jesus knew what they were thinking, so he said to them, “Any country that divides itself into groups which fight each other will not last very long; a family divided against itself falls apart. 18 So if Satan's kingdom has groups fighting each other, how can it last? You say that I drive out demons because Beelzebul gives me the power to do so. 19 If this is how I drive them out, how do your followers drive them out? Your own followers prove that you are wrong! 20 No, it is rather by means of God's power that I drive out demons, and this proves that the Kingdom of God has already come to you.
21 “When a strong man, with all his weapons ready, guards his own house, all his belongings are safe. 22 But when a stronger man attacks him and defeats him, he carries away all the weapons the owner was depending on and divides up what he stole.
23 (D)“Anyone who is not for me is really against me; anyone who does not help me gather is really scattering.
The Return of the Evil Spirit(E)
24 “When an evil spirit goes out of a person, it travels over dry country looking for a place to rest. If it can't find one, it says to itself, ‘I will go back to my house.’ 25 So it goes back and finds the house clean and all fixed up. 26 Then it goes out and brings seven other spirits even worse than itself, and they come and live there. So when it is all over, that person is in worse shape than at the beginning.”
Good News Translation® (Today’s English Version, Second Edition) © 1992 American Bible Society. All rights reserved. For more information about GNT, visit www.bibles.com and www.gnt.bible.